


After the Beginning, Before the End

by nyctanthes



Category: Soulmates (TV 2020)
Genre: Age Difference, Agriculture in the time of climate change, Depression, Doubt and Belief, F/M, Fifth Chances, Implied/Referenced Suicide Attempts (Past), Life Buddies, Post-Episode: s01ep05 Break On Through, Religious And Otherwise, Sex, Soulmates, Third Chances, Trope Subversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27529597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyctanthes/pseuds/nyctanthes
Summary: What existed on the other side of love, the other side of his life. He figured the only way to find out was to walk to the edge of the cliff and step off. Swim far out to sea and float, let the waves carry him across the threshold.Then he learned he had gotten it all wrong.
Relationships: Kurt Shephard/Martha
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	After the Beginning, Before the End

**Author's Note:**

> Why am I compelled to write stories in non-existent fandoms?
> 
> Content Note: This is a single story - not attempting to draw conclusions, be prescriptive or offer solutions - about the aftermath of repeated (two) suicide attempts. It is fiction.

What existed on the other side of love, the other side of his life. He figured the only way to find out was to walk to the edge of the cliff and step off. Swim far out to sea and float, let the waves carry him across the threshold.

Then he learned he had gotten it all wrong.

It took time, quite some time for him to give this lesson more than pious lip service. Like an Easter Christmas churchgoer or a man collapsed by the front door of the Clearwater Lake hospital: staring down the quarter life he’d limped through, insisting he was done with death in-between puking up the toxic contents of his empty, echoing stomach.

(Why would he desire something as base as food, Laurelann and Brother Hickok asked, when he was on the cusp of meeting his soulmate? It was essential, they said, that his self-purification take place inside as well as out. Strained vegetable broth, mealy apples and two-day old bread were the nourishment the Lord prescribed for those on The Road to Dead Soulmate Bliss. If they’d fed him three squares, he just might have gone through with it.) 

He was, he told himself, no longer a death buddy but a life buddy; no longer an acolyte of soulmates but a hesitant, humble interrogator of God who through His mercy made it possible for those who believed in Him and only Him to find the one person in ten billion meant for them and only them. Was it possible, he asked Him, as he prayed from his hospital bed, there was meaningful love beyond The One? He’d begun to suspect this was the case, and he hoped it wasn’t presumptuous to harbor such thoughts. He had, hopefully, decades to look forward to. A long time to spend without love, now he'd embraced life. 

He made changes: 

\- No more lurking on soulmate discussion boards. 

\- Admitting out loud he’d made a mistake, he’d spectacularly fucked up. He’d been snookered, made a fool of by folks who only cared about his money. Didn’t matter there was hardly enough to make it worth the effort of killing him. He was depressed but but but. He had his family, his Church, his work, his God. So many who wanted to help him, if he’d let them in. 

\- Early to bed, early to rise. Regular meals. Working until his blisters split, his heels bled and his head lolled on his neck. Until he couldn’t stay awake. 

\- Taking his meds, because the alternative was talking.

These changes came from his head. And as his mom and his dad, his minister and high school guidance counselor, his few and far between sweethearts and the doctors and nurses both times he tried to kill himself said: Son. Kurt. Boy. Young man. Honey. Child. Your heart is too big for your body. It takes up too much space. You need to leave some room for your brain to do the good, fine work we know it’s capable of. That it can’t do when your heart is forever sighing and crying, skipping and leaping, laughing and moping, talking and talking. Never giving your brain the much-needed opportunity to get across its point of view. A fine, sensible point of view that is only concerned with you - your safety and well-being and happiness. Your future. You’ve got a one-sided conversation going on inside you. And we all know, don’t we, that’s no conversation at all.

*

He was twenty-four when he took the soulmate test, twenty-four when he was informed Heather had died weeks earlier. (Perhaps if he’d taken the test when he was twenty-three, gotten in touch quicker she wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He only had that thought once an hour for a year.)

He knew he was awfully young for wanting to settle down, soulmate settle down. Even in this part of the country, this part of Texas where folks prided themselves that no one understood the importance of family, of faithfulness to it like they did. Understood it not just in its current, fashionable moment but also before: during the Simpler, Better Times. Before all this technological nonsense started. That’s what his dad said. When he and Mom married there was no test. They met the old-fashioned way, at a distant cousin’s funeral. And I wouldn’t have taken that test either, Dad declared monthly, then more frequently as the tests became increasingly popular, Mom supporting him through her silence. He brought up the subject when he should have been thinking about something else. While they fed the livestock, repaired barns and sheds and fences, branded and vaccinated the livestock, did accounts, procured water for the livestock, put up the hay, repaired machinery, marketed the livestock, drove the livestock, counted their money and made hard decisions. Round and round. 

Like I need a test to tell me my own mind, Dad snorted at breakfast and dinner, swollen knuckles wrapped around his fork and knife, tools that might do damage if they escaped his grasp. I don’t need a bunch of strangers telling me what I should do with my life, how I should live it. Playing God, that’s what they’re doing. Some might call that blasphemy. His father’s complaints were their own form of prayer. Until he tried to kill himself, and Dad did his best to never again speak of tests or soulmates, of God’s vs. Man’s role in matters of Love and Destiny.

His dad had a one-sided conversation going on inside him too. That’s what he thought, though he never spoke the words out loud. 

Once you met your soulmate, singular (and sometimes your soulmates, plural, a concept he found simultaneously intriguing and frightening), you settled down. There was pressure, from outside as well as inside yourself, to get together and stay together. Why else take the test? Because you thought it would be amusing to identify your true partner, didn’t mind breaking their heart with your lack of interest? At the testing centers they had therapists on staff, pre-tests to take and endless paperwork to sign. The idea was to weed out the casual testers, the merely curious; fend off the malicious and spiteful and dangerous, to others as well as themselves. Times being what they were, the same as they’d always been, at least where people and their motivations were concerned, that didn’t prevent mischief. Or failures. They were more common than anyone liked to admit. 

Should someone get wind of your failure, though, you had serious questions to answer. If you couldn’t create a happy life with your soulmate, destined and perfect in every way for you and only you, what were your chances of building a successful relationship with someone who wasn’t? A question that wasn’t looking for an answer. They found each other, the soulmates who split up. They had their own books, advocates, cults, self-help groups, think pieces and streamers; their own fashion, music and art; their own movements and political parties and marches. Their own churches, temples, synagogues and prayer circles: weekend afternoons spent drumming and singing, drinking and smoking in the park. He watched them from afar, wondering how he'd react if one of them smiled, beckoned. 

The groups he was eligible to join viewed their situations more seriously. Narrowly. 

That’s why, Martha said at the bar, the evening they met, I waited and waited before taking the test. How else would I know how lucky I was? How this man was The One for me? Without experience, how could I trust God was putting me in good hands? Her cheeks were pinky-red. Her forehead was beaded with sweat from the beer and the conversation, the overheated room. Sawdust from the floor dusted the bottom of her dress. He gestured, and she pulled a peanut shell from her hair. In the bar she smiled constantly, her square face with its high, strong cheekbones self-effacing. But as she spoke these particular words her eyes became brighter and bluer: colder. 

I knew how lucky I was, how lucky I would have been, he promptly countered. I knew right away. 

Oh really, she said, and leaned close. She angled her body towards him, stopped perching high on her stool like a Sunday school teacher. Her brown, tasseled coat spread open, pert breasts winking at him from between the criss-cross V of her lacy, low cut dress. She propped an elbow on the bar, rested her cheek on her fist. Tell me more, she wordlessly ordered. Because she was curious? Teasing him? Waiting for an acceptable amount of conversation to pass before she took him by the hand and led him outside, to the alley behind the bar? 

While he disliked confession, he wasn’t ashamed to speak his mind. Plus, there was the beer, and Martha was pretty. She was near enough to touch - though he didn’t, not inside the bar at least - and her skin was smooth. It was probably, definitely soft. She smelled like roses and wood smoke and something musky, almost dirty, like he’d find in the barn. She was looking at him like he had something to say. 

It was a feeling, he explained, a deep and true one: a recognition. Like in Heather he’d found a part of himself that he knew was there but couldn’t bring to the surface, couldn’t make real on his own. She was similar to a dream, a beautiful one he’d had over and over, wanted to sink back into when he woke up, looked forward to revisiting each night. But she was real. That was why he couldn’t get over her, didn’t feel it was right to forget her. You don’t throw away a gift like that. You cherish it. 

You’re a princess, waiting for your prince to kiss you, wake you from your hundred year sleep, Martha said with a smile: a mix of pity and amusement, a touch of grudging admiration. The soulmate test was made for people like you. Romantics, folks who still believe in true love. He fervently agreed.

What he was ashamed to tell Martha until it was almost too late. _Why_ he felt sick when the counselor at the soulmate testing center informed him Heather was dead. Twice as much relief as regret. Even before he watched Heather’s videos, before he learned how much she'd had access to, growing up; how differently she'd lived her life in comparison to him. How can reality live up to the dreams of those who believe in true love? His dreams. Hers too.

*

Martha didn’t teach him how to ski, not on snow or on water. She didn’t take him to fancy restaurants in Paris and order for him in French. Champagne and foods he’d never eat on his own, but would be willing to try for love: Cold oysters and warm frogs’ legs; head matter that looked like pre-cut bologna chunks except it was called cheese; glands with the appearance and texture of a fried sponge except they were called breads; snails drowned in quarts of butter; the fattened, ground up livers of fowl that resembled nothing so much as a fleshy, cellulite pocked behind that had never been exposed to the sun. A perfectly round, tasty ball of mashed potatoes ruined by the fish eggs inside that burst slimy, salty, sour on the tongue; raw hamburger with a raw egg and raw onions mixed in. Eaten with hard toasted bread that might break his front teeth if he weren’t careful. 

(Truth be told, Martha wasn’t a particularly good cook. Dead soulmate, expert bridge builder and naturally gifted ballroom dancer Tyrone Johnson, he once thought peevishly, after chewing his way through one of her roast chickens, was probably happy to watch Martha eat her homemade meals from his place in the clouds, where all the food tasted like his favorites, whatever those were. Or perhaps, up there, food tasted like real, mythical ambrosia, which he figured was similar to an early summer peach, though it had been years since he’d had a good one. Or perhaps Tyrone didn’t need to eat anything in heaven, where the worthy soulmates went to rest and bide their time.) 

Martha didn’t read books originally written in foreign languages. She didn’t read books. There were many things she wrote off - with a bright, girlish smile that covered her cynicism - as being The Way Things Were. They’ll say anything to make us believe they’re on top of the situation, that they’re the only ones who know what to do, she declared. Even when they don’t, and they aren’t. All they want, you know, is to stay in charge. Doesn't matter how fit they are, how little good they’ve done. How little good they will do, even if they were given two whole lifetimes. She ended her speech with an emphatic head nod, eyes flickering with skepticism while he finished reading her the latest story on local politics or foreign politics, the climate or the economy; young people, old people, society or public health; the movies and technology. All one and the same story, the specifics changing but the overall thrust the same old, same old: Doom. 

She didn’t keep a flock of girlfriends who clustered around her as she narrated her life to the camera, to the world.

Three divorces, coming close to declaring bankruptcy and finding out your financially stable soulmate is dead make you rethink your priorities, was Martha’s only explanation, when he pushed her to explain what she was passionate about, what she’d change about the world, if she could.

Sometimes Martha looked tired and sad, looked uncertain and lost. She’d walk, she'd run as fast as she could if she only knew which direction to turn, what foot to begin with. If someone would only make the decision for her. She’d get herself into situations she couldn’t think her way out of. Not just at the Church - the Cult - of Righteous Transition but also after they escaped. Similar to there, when he tried to help her, point out what he knew was the obvious, simple and only solution to her dilemma she’d explain him away, accuse him of being naive and out of touch with reality. End their conversations with her trump card: _So young._ Until the very last minute, when he’d swoop in to rescue her. 

There were, he learned from Martha, different ways to create excitement. Some folks didn’t need to hike to ancient, crumbling fortresses high up in the misty mountains of Pay-Roo (the proper way to pronounce it, according to Heather); jump out of airplanes and pray their rip cords functioned as promised. For some people adventure, though a more accurate word was _drama,_ inevitably found them, even snug at home.

Martha taught him a few other things, too.

How not to be so fast. It took some time. First they had to get out of the ER, then the ICU, then the regular sick people section of the hospital; followed by bedrest and physical therapy and his parents’ refusal to let him leave the house on his own.

You’ve replaced the soulmate nonsense with _this_ , his father bellowed. The woman who encouraged you to kill yourself! Who was right there with you, drinking down a bottle of death because some conman told her to. Who if you didn’t risk your damn fool life to rescue, he thundered, would be lying in a grave she dug for herself. And she’s almost twenty years older than you! And she’s been divorced four times!

It’s not quite thirteen years, he ventured, though it was fifteen and a third. And she’s been divorced three times. Though the last one wasn’t her fault?

_That’s_ supposed to make me feel better?

Hollering wasn’t Dad's style. For him, he made an exception.

But his parents were near retirement age, worn out from labor under a scorching sun that yearly became less and less forgiving, working land as tired as they were. They were heartsick their love wasn’t sufficient incentive to sustain him, that the by-the-book measures they’d taken with him after he'd hesitantly, then more decisively slashed his wrists over the bathroom sink had so spectacularly failed. Quicker than he dared hope they wearied of being his jailers, and he learned how to use his tongue and his fingers, his hands and his mouth. His whole body. Discovered how to seek out what felt good for him, for her, for both of them together. How to draw out pleasure rather than chase it down, like if he didn’t grab it and refuse to let go there’d be nothing left for him but tears. 

Farm boy, Martha teased as she took his hand and placed his finger where she wanted. You know more about a heifer’s anatomy than a woman’s. There, she said. No, you moved it again. _There._

I know where it is, he protested. But it was one thing to cop a feel in the backseat of a truck with a girl wearing a chastity ring, a soulmate promise ring and often both. Sighing and spreading her legs, followed by squeaking and smacking his hand away, clamping her thighs shut and glaring at him as he stumbled through his apologies. To touch it while groping in the dimly lit closet of a VR headset, stripped as a pre-bloom magnolia under a cloudless February sky, glistening with desire as a program cooed its approval. 

It was a whole ‘nother thing to be up close and personal with it, no barriers between him and her. It was a lot to take in. All the smells and tastes and nothing stayed still and it was small, practically hidden; attached to a body, her body that also moved, but all at once in different directions. Martha didn’t make the excited, ecstatic, obvious noises he'd grown to expect. The clips and sims were no help. There was hair. It was fleshy. If he was doing it right, it was wet and sticky. Sometimes there was lube that made everything wetter and stickier. In the beginning he routinely got confused and overwhelmed. He worried he was doing it wrong, would always do it wrong. Thoughts he was sensible enough to keep to himself, even after Martha declared him Much Improved.

She pressed her fingers into his skin like he was made of cookie dough; skated them from top of his ribs down to his hip, then over his stomach and up the other side. She stroked his arms, his shoulders and back; murmured that farming had been good to him. She pinched the tight skin between his ribs, belted her hands around his waist and laughed with delight. She lay between his thighs, pinned his arms over his head, so he couldn’t touch her, and kissed him again and again, slow and luxurious. He groaned and rocked his hips up, seeking friction she wouldn’t yet provide. Slow down, he told himself. Think about something else. Think about the stench of their bodies, leaking poison into their burial clothes. How as he ran with her slung across his back she kept tilting right, threatening to slip out of his sweaty grasp. The starch in those white cotton pajamas made it almost impossible to hold her in place. Her vomit dripped clear through his hair, down his cheeks and into his dry, panting mouth. It tasted like fake sweetener and stomach juices. It was sheer will, more likely sheer luck that he succeeded in getting them to the hospital in time.

It was God’s will, his mother testified. She wanted him to agree with her, to join her in praise but he was tired of other people speaking on his behalf. Declaring what was acceptable and what was forbidden. Demanding that he live his life according to their tenets, promising he’d regret it if he didn’t. None of them agreed with each other anyway. 

You’re so, Martha said, as she encouraged him to hitch up his leg. With one hand she held him in place while with the other she eased two slick fingers inside him. Not pretty, not at all. Not a place he’d paid much attention to on his own, but when she touched him, there, a sound came out of his mouth that he didn’t recognize. He lit up like a hundred, a thousand LED sparklers on the Fourth of July.

What? I’m so what, he panted, lifting his head to look at her, always dazzled by what he saw, always grateful for who was there.

She considered, as she took him in her hand. Fresh, she decided.

Like an egg? Like a calf, he said, a twinge of irritation cooling the melty feeling in his limbs, slicing through the stone in his belly that held him in place.

No, she disagreed. Fresh like spring. She swung a leg over him and maneuvered him into place. A signal he could finally touch her breasts, her thighs, between her legs as, with that hitching, cut-off moan that drove him crazy, she sank down and rose up.

He liked the sound of that a whole lot better. What season does that make you, he joked.

She went still, opened her eyes and met his grin with a deadpan expression, an incredulous, testy sigh. When he continued to stare at her, confused and silent she rolled off him, off the bed completely, furious that she needed to say it.

“Autumn,” she tossed over her shoulder as she stalked to the bathroom.

*

Their hijacked rescuer recovered from his head injury. He didn’t end up giving away the farm. The police, county legal stepped in and took care of that, of them: the evil-doers. The wheels of justice - rusty, grinding and creaking, occasionally ear-splitting - spun slowly, eventually faster. Dad once again changed the paperwork, keeping the farm in trust for him until he was thirty. He assigned him a responsible adult he was forced to run key financial decisions past. It’ll be longer, Dad promised, if you can’t be sensible for more than a week at a time.

I will be sensible, he said devoutly. For more than a week, absolutely. For the rest of my life, I swear it. This time he wasn’t lying, wasn’t afraid to make eye contact. Twenty-three thousand days of being sensible, of letting his brain have its say and its way.

In the following days and months he got down on himself for his past mistakes. He castigated himself for being rash and lovesick, foolish and impulsive; for hurting not just himself but others; for not comprehending that others’ feelings mattered, not considering even his parents until it was almost too late. He got down on himself for his current mistakes: still finding it hard to listen to his brain that his heart remained skeptical of, fought when it asked for time and space to present its case.

Martha disagreed. You’re searching, she said from the passenger seat of his pickup. There’s nothing wrong with that.

On those rare summer days with thick cloud cover, when they could be outside, bare skinned without burning it to a crisp they’d get up before dawn, eat breakfast, pack food for the day and drive to nowhere in particular. Far out in the country where the data was spotty and the universal wifi never worked as promised. Where the radio stations were static save the occasional, crackly-stuttery voice reciting Bible verses from impossibly far away - the Moon or Jupiter. Their unspoken goal was to find water. A couple of times, they succeeded.

What do you think I’m searching for? He liked to ask Martha questions, keep her talking. He turned left, onto a narrow dirt road with steep drop-offs instead of shoulders, passing over the remains of a long dry culvert. It was pitted with small boulders, dented with holes big enough for his tires to slot into.

She didn’t answer straight off. Despite the dust clouds blowing across the bleached fields, ghosting along the road and up and over the hood, summoned by their jolting wheels, she rolled down her window and crooked an elbow on it. She focused on a view she’d been looking at for most of her life. Her hair, that day well past her shoulders, whipped around her face, but she didn’t bother to smooth it away.

She stuck her arm out the window and gestured at the earth, at the rolling hills and short, dry grasses shedding their skins, unveiling powdery dirt white as a field of freshly fallen snow. He'd seen it once, when he was a child, blanketing the world in silence. Lying phosphorescent under the moonlight. Like a dream gone by morning. 

It had been a couple of hours since they'd seen a successful, manmade effort to turn the land green. Only faded ranches and farmhouses accompanied by ramshackle buildings and seen-better-days machinery. Most abandoned, though there were the occasional clusters of horses and cattle, pessimistically nosing the dirt. 

You're searching for what all this means, what we’re supposed to do with our time on this dying rock, besides survive. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to figure out, during those moments we can stop worrying about the basics? Once we admit that no matter how hard we pray God isn’t going to prevent catastrophes for any of us, let alone proactively help us. He’s not going to turn the oceans into drinking water or fix the raggedy atmosphere, find our perfect mate or get us a good-paying job with benefits. There’s no higher power interested in fixing our broken marriages or erasing our shitty childhoods. That’s on us. We’re all we have. 

It made his stomach hurt to hear her talk like that, so direct about what he only tip-toed the edges of. But less than it used to.

Wasn’t wanting an answer, not trusting in - he waggled his hand, pointed to the roof of the truck - what got me in trouble in the first place? And the second place. I lost my mind when I thought I had the rest of my life all figured out, that Heather would make me a whole person, a real person but she was taken away from me. He clenched his hands around the steering wheel, pressed too hard on the gas and almost lost an axle to a small boulder. I had to meet her, had to take charge and make the change happen right away. I couldn’t wait another week, forget about sixty years. 

He didn’t say this to encourage cosseting, to listen to Martha’s reassuring words. He was full of doubts: about how to be, whom to trust, what was safe for him to feel and what would lead to trouble.

She dug around in his glove compartment for one of the elastics she stored inside, tied her hair in a loose bun on top of her head, exposing the strip of grey that lurked underneath. That was just grief, she said. You got swept along by a current. Stuck a toe in, a foot in, then two feet and _whoosh_. It was much deeper than you thought, so much faster and stronger. But you didn’t just fight it, you beat it. You won, and not only for yourself.

She smiled at him fondly, unusually serene; leaned over the gear shift and rapped his temple with her knuckles, not holding back. It’s not all common sense up there, no matter what folks say. And for some of us, she pointed out, rueful but resigned, try as she might there wasn’t much she could do to improve her situation, it’s the opposite. I thought my last marriage was a practical affair. I went about it all businesslike. Weighed the pros and cons and prayed with my minister. Hell, I talked to my lawyer. Look how well that turned out. Half my hard-earned life savings turned over in the divorce. Gifted to an alcoholic loser who gambled away his own pension while I was working like a dog. My head didn’t see that one coming. Though it should have. 

It was the desert willow that caught their attention. Three spindly trunks, each growing in a different direction, topped by a mass of waxy leaves and pastel flowers in multiple stages of growth. Completely out of place amidst the parched, beige landscape, like someone slipping into a purple satin dress to go to McDonald’s. They parked under the skimpy shade it offered, got out and stretched. They drank warm water from one of the big plastic jugs he stored in the back seat, letting it run down their chins, past their collarbones until the fronts of their clothes were damp. Martha plucked trumpet-shaped flowers from branches and stuck them here and there in her hair. She pushed her nose in one and breathed deep. They don’t smell like anything, she complained. 

Watch out for the bees, he warned as he wandered off to take a piss, four inch grasshoppers scattering before him, click-clacking in protest. They'd made it to real country. No houses, farms or buildings of any kind in sight - not in the distance, not broken down and abandoned, drowsing under the vault of heaven. He saw no electricity or telephone poles; heard no trucks or combines or tractors. There was nothing to shatter the illusion that he and Martha were the only survivors of an apocalypse - pick your type. He was partial to the ones that were least likely to happen: zombies or a second Ice Age.

A few hundred yards away from the road they discovered a pond that hadn’t dried up, shallow and filmed with algae the color of alfalfa. Attracting frogs and basking turtles, pocket-sized, skittish fluffs of birds that darted from reed to reed and long-limbed, long billed waders with limp, once-white feathers. They stepped purposefully, morosely through the shallows, their beady, hopeful eyes searching for fish he couldn’t imagine had enough oxygen to breathe. Martha spread a plaid blanket over the grass - a sizeable patch by the water that was brown but not a sunburnt husk of itself, like those long dead insects he was too lazy to clean off his dashboard. They laid down on it, tangled in a heap despite the pizza oven sky pressing down on them. 

She put her ear on his chest, over his heart. Flowers fell from her hair onto his shirt, onto the blanket and the grass. It’s strong, it’s talking to me, she breathed. Her voice was wistful with something green, less than tender running quick below. In the hospital the doctors told her the poison they drank had done something bad to her system. I’ve got two months or twenty-four months or twenty years, she announced, springing the news on him at their first post-hospital meeting, while she wiped down the condiment jars with a crumbly napkin. No one knows, so it’ll be a wonderful surprise, she said. Brittle as a cracked bone, cheerful as the recycled fabric holly bush in her waiting area. Hopefully, if it’s sooner rather than later they’ll have one of those pig hearts ready for me. And on the bright side, so many years fewer before I meet Tyrone.

I’m sorry, so sorry, he said, face crumpling with disbelief and sorrow. More for her than for himself. He was relieved he didn’t have to stretch for it, could offer comfort without being distracted by what her diagnosis meant for him. His god damn bad luck with women. 

Behind thick clouds of blue slate, the color of the Gulf on a stormy day, the sun was halfway to ten o'clock and paper white. He closed his eyes, let the heat gnaw the delicate skin around his eyes. Through his shirt he felt Martha’s breasts, pressed against his chest; her breath, tickling his chin. Through the blanket he felt the grass, itchy against his back. He listened to the crickets scratch, the frogs croak, their hearts beat. 

What’s my heart saying, he whispered, though he already knew the answer.

That you want to kiss me. And he did, this morning neither slow nor soft. He rolled her onto her back and thrust against her, bit her neck and the tops of her breasts. He hiked up her sundress and pulled off her underwear; under his shirt her smooth, creamy pink nails scratched up and down his back. He kissed and kissed those long, sweat-slick legs that woke him up, forced him to consider he might have made a serious mistake handing his life over to Brother Samson and his glib, morbid promises, his shining pool of water. He licked a stripe up her, stale and funky from hours of driving in a truck with a broken air-conditioner, taking coffee-fueled, roadside piss breaks. He honed in exactly where he should and was rewarded with a giggle - Your scruff! It tickles! Followed by an extended sigh. As her knees softened, her hands flexed around his upper arms, the tension seeped from her bones into the rough ground. Afterwards, he rested his cheek on the far side of her hip, slipped his hand under her dress and stroked the skin below her belly button: soft on top, a touch of slack; firm underneath. Enough to fill his mouth, to hold in his hand though she typically swatted him away with a growl: Stop that, get away from there. That afternoon she twitched, she hesitated, but she let him stay. A victory.

* 

Martha worked in a picturesque, mid-size town spilling over with those rich enough to escape the city and its stricter water rationing, its household faucets on two-hour shifts, but who lacked the means to escape the state altogether. Near his hometown but with an entirely different feel to it - clean energy and self-driving cars - that made him wonder who and what he would have become, if he'd grown up here. One morning before Christmas he walked into her office bold as can be, then sat meekly in the reception area until lunch: chewing the skin from his bottom lip, flipping hastily, unseeing through the words and pictures on his screen until she walked into the room. He almost didn’t recognize her. She was dressed business-like; wore rectangular reading glasses, no trace of blonde dye in her brown, fancy braided hair. She was a CPA. When she told him what her job was it was akin to a kick in the teeth. He assumed she did customer service shifts from home. Ten minute breaks every one hundred and ten minutes. Every syllable she uttered was analyzed for appropriate tone, simultaneous feedback was provided during her chats with customers. Each flex of her butt cheeks was tagged by the sensors in her company issued chair. Or perhaps she worked reception at a family-run dental practice, law office or funeral home. A place where it was important to smile and offer sympathy, though never too much. Don't give the customers the wrong idea: Everyone has to pay. Yet here she was, her own boss, working all day with numbers. He assumed someone with a job like that would be more protective of themselves, more practical. They'd have a tidy personal life - one kid or possibly two, a dog and a cat, a house that took care of itself and a partner to take care of the rest. Everything organized exactly to their specifications.

He told her that, later; she wasn’t offended. We’ve all got multiple selves, she explained. Selves that don’t match up all neat and clean, selves that reflect our past and what’s happened to us. Some of us have been around long enough to have seen them all, know where they came from and why they’re there. To understand we don’t have much control over them.

Can I hold your hand, life buddy, he asked as they walked under a pale yellow sun, a watery blue sky, along a sidewalk quilted with leaves brought down by yesterday's dry windstorm. Too warm for anything heavier than a t-shirt, feet sweating in his boots.

No, she hissed, and veered sharply away from him. She slipped on a patch of leaves, ignored his attempt to steady her. What are you suggesting? That we hold hands on the street, in front of all these folks who know me? Who've probably seen you on the news and know the entire, sordid story. What’ll they say? It’s bad for business. I need the business! 

Ok, he said, slightly disappointed but fully expecting that particular answer. He’d lectured himself in the truck on the drive over: out loud, brain fully in charge. Now, Kurt, just because she agreed to have lunch with you, just because you had sex a couple of times doesn’t mean you’re allowed to expect anything from her. Maybe you’ll become friends. Friends are good and Lord knows you need a friend. She might need one too. If you’re not too eager, too pathetic and demanding that friend could be you. If she says that’s what she wants. 

Damn it, she snapped. Stop looking at me like I kicked your puppy. She drifted back towards him, hooked her pinky finger with his for half a block before dropping it. Satisfied?

Yes, he said, the same way he used to say Amen.

They went to the third best lunch place on Main Street and ate nachos with the works. Asked for extra jalapeños and thumped red globs of hot sauce onto their beans and rice. After weeks of nothing but 3D printed meals, _spicy_ was a less scary concept than it used to be. 

Do you know how women feel, when you look at them with those eyes, all brown and soulful, she asked. A fair number of men too. You don’t, do you? How’ve you gone so many years without someone taking you in hand, showing you the ropes? She looked at the table and shook her head. Smiled to herself, despite herself.

His mouth went dry, then moist. He blushed at the images she conjured up, shifted in his chair to relieve the pressure in his jeans. I don’t talk to many girls. Many women, he corrected himself. Not many men either. Not many people, truth be told.

But when you let yourself talk, turns out you have something to say. They're not stupid things, either. They're smart things, she amended, before he had a chance to defend himself. Like back at…you surprised me. More than once.

I’m sorry, he said. Those days he spent half his time apologizing.

Don’t be, she shrugged, frowning into her empty, short glass of sweet tea, turning to search for their waiter, to see if she could charm more from him. Turns out I like surprises - well, some of them - more than I thought. She finally looked at him, smiled at him in her fashion: almost generous.A wide smile followed by a grimace and an eye-roll. If she didn’t hold back, cut the sweet with the bitter, she’d be giving too much of herself away.

Day by day, that’s what Martha asked of him. After he snuck out of his house like he’d only done a handful of times when he was sixteen. A doctor’s appointment, they called me and want me to come in for a follow-up he told his mother. Today. Right now. He had to see Martha, had to talk to her. A lightning bolt of apprehension that the feeling he’d had inside him all his life was loneliness. Today he could not only name it, he could fix it. He knew that if he ignored it, let slip the opportunity, the friendship Martha offered he’d fade away. Or explode. He’d once again do something awful. Not death, he promised everyone not death and he didn't want that any longer. Not today. Nevertheless, he'd do something awful he’d immediately regret. Whatever the opposite of sensible was, that was what he would do. Mom didn’t believe the doctor had called: it was nearing five o’clock on a Friday. But Dad wasn’t there to interrogate him, and she read his thoughts on his face. Or not. The Lord sees all, makes all things possible. He will provide. That was how she explained to herself what she didn’t understand, and he never made it easy for her to comprehend him.

That evening he and Martha sat in chairs round her fire pit, watched the moon float through silvery wisps of clouds. They opened a bottle of her second husband's whiskey the third husband had miraculously left untouched, that she'd been saving for a special occasion. Later, he roasted hot dogs, baked apples that he first sprinkled with brown sugar and wrapped in foil. The moon was nearly overhead, well past the treetops and flooding the backyard, overwhelming the fire when she put a hand on his knee, traced it with her fingers. He shifted closer, a question in his eyes. She stopped him with a firm hand on his chest. She pushed him away, knotted her fingers in his sweater so he wouldn’t travel far. None of that soulmate shit, she warned. None of that happily ever after. That’s not what this is about. It can’t be like that. Don’t get me wrong, she said, I want you. God knows I want you. But I can’t be responsible for your happiness. I couldn't stand it, I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you, if you hurt yourself on account of something stupid I said or did. And if history is anything to go by, I will be stupid. 

Day by day, he agreed. He was ready to consider the possibility that _Today_ was a concept worth taking seriously. And he kept his word the best he could manage. For quite some time he thought only about the day he was living in. When he got good at that, he added the next day. And then a little more and a little more. Most of his future thinking centered around the farm. Most of his future thinking didn’t involve Martha. Though there were days he slipped up, dreamt of a future he knew wasn't possible but wasn’t scared of, not even deep down. He’d love for it to be his reality. He asked for what she couldn’t give him, then was forced to pretend she'd mistaken his intent. He didn't want that from her after all.

One day, well before his birthday and well after Soulmates’ Day, Martha presented him with a couple of fancy pens and a notebook bound in forest green leather, with a suede tie to wrap it closed. It was a notebook like Heather might have owned. 

One of those head-shrinkers told me it would be good to keep a journal, Martha said casually, excusing away her gift, pretending she’d acted on a whim. It might be good for you too.

Has it been useful to keep a journal, he asked, imagining Martha propped up in bed, surrounded by her pillows, covered by her puffy comforter that each night ended up on the floor, scribbling away her secret thoughts, the ones behind her words. If he looked in her bedside table would he find her journal, rose red or violet or pearly grey, nestled next to her vibrators?

Oh, I gave it up after a week, she said breezily. I don’t need to spend more time in my head. I can’t say it’s served me particularly well, and no amount of writing is going to change that. But you might get something out of it. You can learn to conversate with yourself, using her fingers as gently smirky quotation marks, since you’re worried you’re not doing a sufficiently good job.

He kept the notebook and pens in his room, on the shelf next to his bed where his screen once held pride of place. When he remembered, when he wasn’t too tired or busy or preoccupied he wrote in it. Though writing was a big word for what were lists - what he’d done that day, what he would do the next day. When he was feeling low, cutting himself with thoughts of Heather (when he would see her again, if he would see her again, what she would say to him, if she'd be proud of him), the writing was a reminder that he’d made progress, had accomplishments he could point to. It was a reminder that good things existed, even for him. 

Most of what he wrote about was work. Feeding, watering and supplementing. Birthing and butchering. Sheltering and pasturing. Buying and selling and breeding. Staying calm, keeping safe through extremes of heat and cold, disease and drought and pestilence, most of the plagues. And that was just the sheep and the cows. In the best of times it wasn’t easy to keep a modest family farm afloat. In those times it was sheer orneriness: a willingness to point to the questionable future as reason to maintain course in the present. Orneriness that his father possessed in abundance and he inherited a small measure of himself. Along with a certain lack of imagination. Over and over it was explained to him that it would be safer and wiser, in his best interest to quit; it was his _responsibility_ to pass the land on to someone with more everything than he possessed. But should he give it up he had no idea what he might do with himself, for the next twenty thousand days.

Or perhaps it was a decision made with his heart, masquerading as one he made with his head.

Occasionally, there was more to write about. The first time he saw the ocean. Endless, mesmerizing variations on grey-blue-green, salty foam speckling his shins, more powerful than he could ever have imagined. Tall, choppy waves that came in fast, one after another. Hard to swim in for more than a few minutes at a time and, despite all he’d read, freezing cold. The first time he went to a country that wasn’t Mexico, though it was only over the border to foggy, water-logged Canada. It didn’t count as international travel when you could drive there and practically everyone spoke English. A meal he made for Martha. Nothing fancy - boiled potatoes with butter and parsley, lettuce and steak - but all from his land. She said it was one of the best meals she’d ever eaten, and he believed her. The day the folks from the ag college dropped by to talk to him about different ways to manage the farm: more sustainable, less resource intensive. Less livestock. He didn’t run them off like his father had, insisting he'd learned everything he needed, had already made the necessary adjustments even as his choices shaved their margins clear to the bone. Instead, he invited them to come inside for a cup of coffee and listened to their patter. He invited them back. He made changes, little ones and eventually bigger ones and finally the biggest ones. It was his farm now, free and clear, and it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do, if they were to survive. 

There were times, the days and weeks after Martha was gone, he wrote more frequently. Not dead gone but out of Texas gone. She read a book, then another book. About women who take control of their lives, stop relying on men for fulfillment. They launch second careers because they’re never too old to focus on what they love. They hike the Appalachian Trail and sail to Antarctica; migrate with the zebras and the wildebeests. They travel to places that are the palest shadows of what once existed, before people ruined them. Places that will be soon be gone, but there was solace to be found in declaring they saw them, touched and smelled them, felt their exotic breezes on the backs of their necks. Once upon a time. She traveled towards the adventure rather than waiting for it to come to her, in whatever form it might choose. I'll never forget you, she said, covering his face with kisses, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing until he couldn't breathe. You saved my life, showed me a different way to be. We'll always stay in touch, she promised. But Martha was open to love - to sex, he heard her correcting him - in many forms. And who was he to try to stop her. 

When he ran out of pages in the green notebook he used scrap paper of any size, his mother’s handwriting on many of them, stored them topsy-turvy in a desk drawer but it was still a record: of his work, of the people he learned to share his time with, his self with.

On the other side of love, of his life there’s days, the rest of them. Not much, perhaps. Or perhaps everything.

**Author's Note:**

> I found the episode a bit of a mixed bag, but I enjoyed the performances. As someone firmly disinterested in the soulmate trope played straight, the questions of what is happening in the nebulous near future that makes soulmates appealing, what people might do in the name of soulmates, what the fallout is once they realize the concept creates as many problems as it "fixes"...all were interesting to play around with. 
> 
> More prosaically, I like the age difference and the Martha/Kurt chemistry. 
> 
> Title borrowed from [Deborah Brown](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154737/after-the-beginning-before-the-end). The beginning and ending sentences also took some inspiration from the poem. Some of the descriptions of deep country originated in Abby Geni's _The Wildlands_.


End file.
